*Blog post started on October 16, 2020.
My three day weekend cannot come soon enough. The Staley blog network (NinetyForChill.com, MainEventOfTheDead.com, Russ's Remnants of Anime, and Disgruntled Real Championship Wrestling)
are scheduled out to early November, so it will be a nice change of
pace to not keep stockpiling content. The biggest problem for my blogs
right now is a dependence upon wrestling content.
And
with that said, I may as well address recent championship title changes
in pro wrestling. "Bad Taste" is in the title of this blog post, and
that is the general consensus of what people think the fans of that
industry have. My personal taste says we fans should lean into that
more, but when I suggest the Katie Vick was a fun angle, that opinion
maybe disqualified.
As
a horror and occasional raunchy comedy fan, I respect when the creators
take something further than what the audience considers far enough. If
Triple H did not toss the brains at the end of the funeral parlor
segment, my thoughts about the angle would be that it was in poor taste.
Once that poor taste has been taken to the bad realm, the imagination
of the audience has been destroyed. To gain that kind of control is
something I admire.
For my argument with Billy Corgan over poor versus bad taste, visit MainEventOfTheDead.com.Is
the Intercontinental Championship greater than the TNT Championship?
See why it is not be visiting DRCWwrestling.blogspot.com.
Three-on-one handicap match against the champion versus a dog collar
blood bath: Cody's title victory is the superior than Zayn's.
A
blood bath serves as a perfect transition into how I finally got around
to Peter Jackson's debut directorial effort, "Bad Taste". The prior
night, I revisited the failed lesbian take on the already pretentious
"Dead Poets Society", Canada's "Lost and Delirious". It ended up being a
downer of a film on top of that, so I needed something to cleanse my
pallet. "Young Adult" is still a disc that I need to open, but as a
depressed writer, I did not think the feature was right to bounce back
from patriarchal bullshit (The only valid thing about "Lost and
Delirious outside a Graham Greene supporting role is that it took place
in the current day, so making it about accepting teenage lesbians at an up tight boarding school a good premise.).
As
I looked through my unwatched DVD's and Blu-rays, "Young Adult" was the
only film under 97 minutes. Anything purchased on iTunes was either
foreign or experimental, so I did not know if I had the attention span
for those. So I turned to Amazon Prime's offerings, and "Bad Taste" beat
out "Night of the Demons" as my choice to add to my 90-minute movie
data base.
Was
there really a choice between these two "classics"? It is an Academy Award
winner B-movie versus the guy who directed the sequel to Charlie
Sheen's "The Arrival". To
director Kevin Tenney's credit, his movie called "Brain Dead" from 2007
did help inspire me to write my B-movie script, "Main Event of the
Dead". Email russthebus07@gmail.com with any questions about my
production.
Bad Taste
The
Astro Investigation and Defense Service (a joke that may have been
ahead of its time) is investigating the town of Kaihoro, New Zealand.
There seems to be no locals present, just a group of men in identical
blue work shirts and jeans. Barry and Derek are the advance team.
Barry
is quick to capture one of these men while Derek is being tracked by an
axe-wielding simpleton who he destroys with his magnum. Based on the
reaction the two have received upon arrival, Barry is certain these are
not friendly aliens with glowing fingers but extra terrestrials who
intend to end humanity. It is a good thing their action-loving team
members Frank and Ozzy (Is this a Muppet joke?) are en route to this town.
With
all this ruckus, a gang of these aliens mount a counter attack which
results in Barry taking a fall that leaves him with a compound fracture
of the skull. The team writes him off, but the persistence of Barry
allows him to figure out ways to keep his brain matter in his cranium,
but perhaps at the cost of his sanity. Unfortunately, our heroes cannot
leave because a charity collector, Giles, had arrived before Frank and
Ozzy could block the roads into town.
Giles
is soon captured, so the boys are set on rescuing him. As they
infiltrate the alien base, they discover what has happened to the town
folk. The aliens represent Crum's Country Delights and they have decided
that human beings will be the dish that will make them competitive in
the intergalactic fast food market once again. Kaihoro maybe lost, but
there is no way the AIDS team is going to let Lord Crum and his cronies
introduce this new menu item to space car hops.
"Bad
Taste" is a very cheap slash-stick comedy which is very amateur in
nature, but successfully shows there is a great director behind it.
Peter Jackson shot this film over four years on weekends and the New
Zealand film board took notice of his dedication. The result is a great
exercise in practical gore effects while being more amusing and easier
for the squeamish to stand than the similar efforts of Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead".
This
film was a passion project of Jackson who knew this feature just had to
get made. He was going to give audiences a bad film though, so his
clever direction allows us to forgive the features shortcomings. It is
more than apparent that Jackson lacked the means to produce high art,
but his short cuts allow the audience to be in on the joke that these cheats
are.
Until
the finale, the action starts as being a little too sloppy for its own
good. It starts to feel long, but the once a chainsaw-wielding
psychopath is introduced, it finds its groove and becomes a ball until the gory
climax that was repeated in "Dead Alive" and was missing from all of his
features after (I may need to rewatch "The Frighteners" and "Heavenly
Creatures" to confirm the lack of rebirth sequences.). Darn PG-13 and
its limitations.
Excellent
gore, a John Carpenter styled soundtrack, and the sheer absurdness of
"Bad Taste" make this feature a classic. The film becomes more polished
as it moves along (probably because of the New Zealand government
funding), so it feels like you are learning about film makings alongside
the great auteur Peter Jackson. It also leaves you missing the gory
beauty that he was producing, but would you trade it for "The Lord of
the Rings Trilogy? With the sheer amount of false endings in "Return of
the King", perhaps.
